Press

Fifteen people were charged Tuesday in what the Manhattan District Attorney's office called a fake vaccine card conspiracy..."This is something we've never seen before, we've seen it in the dark web...we've never seen it just broadly offered to the general public like it is right now," said Fakespot CEO Saoud Khalifah. Demand for the fake cards is soaring as more companies and venues are requiring proof of vaccination -- but buyer beware, handing over your personal information leaves you open to possibly identity theft.

Scammers also have been found selling bogus COVID-19 vaccination cards on eBay, Etsy and Shopify. Counterfeiters used common ecommerce tools to build authentic-looking custom shops and websites. Mainstream web tools have "introduced a new dynamic to society where people can counterfeit immunity and interplace it with a fake card," said Khalifah Saoud, CEO of Fakespot, a company that uses AI to detect inauthentic content...

New research suggests the average American wastes over $70,000 in their lifetime on disappointing online purchases.... “Our study found that although people tend to trust online reviews, they don’t always read them,” said Saoud Khalifah, Fakespot’s CEO. “Consumers may be uncertain of the legitimacy of the reviews and may want to find out for themselves, or they may have just fallen for a deal that’s too good to be true.” More than half of respondents (56 percent) said they return their disappointing buys, while 30 percent throw them out and 29 percent opt to give them away as gifts.

Fakespot is a popular app for combating fraudulent review scores on online shopping platforms like Amazon or Shopify, but if you want to use it, you’ll need an Android phone.

Across several online stores, fake reviews or paying people for a good word has become an increasing problem. The issue is prevalent on Amazon, where a dozen or so companies were recently caught in a “reviews for rewards” scheme.

...and called Amazon’s claim that it could steal users’ personal information “absolute rubbish,” adding that the company does not monetize by selling user data and never would.

...Indeed, Khalifah's concern represents more than just empty words. In addition to fake reviews, Amazon has long been awash in counterfeit products — some of which are actually dangerous...

“We don’t steal users’ information, we’ve never done that,” Khalifah said. “They’ve shown zero proof and Apple acted on this with zero proof.”s...

--Recent reviews: Before you read the reviews, be sure to sort them by the most recent, according to Saoud Khalifah,...

If you’re not into browser extensions or just want a more seamless way to shop safely, Fakespot has a brand new offering: An iOS app for iPhone that incorporates its scam-spotting tech into the shopping experience.

“Fakespot Secure Shopping completely replicates the mobile Amazon shopping experience, with a catch …. they use AI to weed out the thousands and thousands of fake products and products littered with fake reviews that shoppers don’t even know exist,”...

...consumer experts like Fakespot CEO and Founder Saoud Khalifah are warning about a scam involving fake vaccination cards being sold online. “Store names like vaccinationcards.com, fakecards.com, things like that,” Khalifah told News 3.

Scammers are also capitalizing on the low-tech record-keeping system. Hundreds of fraudsters are selling fake versions of the CDC-issued vaccine cards through ecommerce platforms including eBay, Etsy and Shopify, according to Saoud Khalifah, CEO of Fakespot, which uses artificial intelligence to warn consumers of online retail scams...

According to Saoud Khalifah, the founder of Fakespot, which offers data analysis to help detect counterfeit items online, scammers have also been selling fraudulent vaccine stamps.

“We found hundreds of online stores selling the cards, potentially thousands were sold,” said Saoud Khalifah, the founder of Fakespot, which offers tools to detect fake listings and reviews online.

“We found hundreds of online stores selling the cards, potentially thousands were sold,” Saoud Khalifa, the chief executive officer of Fakespot, a company that offers online tools to ferret out bogus reviews and offers.

Beware of Amazon. Saoud Khalifah, the founder of FakeSpot, a company that offers tools to detect fake listings and reviews online, said a third-party seller most likely took control of the product listing and sold fakes to make a quick buck. “It’s a bit of a Wild West,” he said. “You think it’s real and suddenly you get sick.”

In an analysis of more than 124,000 Shopify stores, Fakespot found more than 25,000 that engaged in some form of fraudulent activity like counterfeits, privacy leaks, or buying fake reviews. Of those, almost 72% showed evidence of dropshipping tactics being used in their business

If you’ve ever paid for something online but never received the item, chances are you chose a no-name online store, like I did last September. Or maybe you received the wrong item, an inferior item, or a counterfeit one. Or it arrived months late. All of these are common problems, says Fakespot CEO Saoud Khalifah.

Fakespot called about 39 percent of the sketchy stores “problematic sellers,” meaning they were hawking counterfeit goods, possibly infringing on brands or had poor reputations. Another 28 percent were described as scam shops with suspiciously cheap listings and privacy leaks, the firm said.

Nearly 21% of Shopify (SHOP) stores pose a fraud risk to their customers, according to new analysis by e-commerce authentication service Fakespot. Nearly 26,000 of the 124,000 Shopify stores analysed by Fakespot were “related to fraudulent practices,” says Fakespot.

...the online marketplace has become a hub for scams and counterfeit goods, according to eCommerce authentication service FakeSpot. In fact, FakeSpot said it analyzed more than 120,000 Shopify sites and found “as many as 21 per cent posed a risk to shoppers,” the Financial Times reports. As lockdowns have hit around the world, Shopify has helped traditional retailers open online stores and get their goods out to the market...

“These might be the last frontier of authentic reviews,” said Saoud Khalifah, the chief executive of Fakespot, a company that analyzes e-commerce reviews. His tools suggest that produce reviews are of “very high” quality, meaning that they’re likely written by real onion customers about authentic onion experiences...

“These might be the last frontier of authentic reviews,” said Saoud Khalifah, the chief executive of Fakespot, a company that analyzes e-commerce reviews. His tools suggest that produce reviews are of “very high” quality, meaning that they’re likely written by real onion customers about authentic onion experiences...

... If there are a couple of thousand reviews and they are all five stars... there's something fishy going on,” said Saoud Khalifah, founder and CEO of Fakespot. “It's highly unlikely that that would happen in the real world unless someone is gaming the system.”...

“What does a five-star review mean?” said Saoud Khalifah, the founder of Fakespot.com, a tech firm whose software helps identify rigged reviews. “If the food is five-star but the waiter is one-star, how do you score your review?”...

About 42% of 720 million Amazon reviews assessed by the monitoring service Fakespot Inc. from March through September were unreliable, up from about 36% for the same period last year. The rise in fake reviews corresponded with the stampede online of millions of virus-avoiding shoppers.

According to the CEO of Fakespot, a free browser extension designed to weed out unreliable product ratings, the number of misleading reviews on Amazon soared in 2020. Fakespot CEO Saoud Khalifah blames the surge in review fraud on Covid-19, which has caused e-commerce to skyrocket and created steep competition for vendors hoping to tap into all that new money coming in.

“We have these clubs of professional reviewers that literally this is their daytime job,” explained Saoud Khalifah, CEO of Fakespot, a website that helps consumers identify fake reviews and counterfeit items. “Since lockdown, I would say the amount of issues happening on these platforms has skyrocketed,”...

"The algorithms that are used are very hush-hush,” says Saoud Khalifah, chief executive of Fakespot, a service that analyses the authenticity of reviews on the web...

One estimate, from the online review analysis group Fakespot, suggested that the problem peaked in May, when 58 per cent of products on Amazon.co.uk were accompanied by seemingly fake reviews...

In Bloomberg’s report, researchers working for Fakespot Inc. found that fake Amazon reviews spiked 36% compared to this time last year.

Third-party sellers now account for more than half of the products listed on the site. That said, Amazon listing review site Fakespot has concluded that almost 20% of Amazon sellers are unreliable.

According to Fakespot (a Chrome add-on that identifies bad reviews and bad sellers) there are millions of products and hundreds of thousands of sellers that are unreliable, amounting to 15% of Amazon sellers that are considered as such.

Saoud Khalifah, founder and CEO of counterfeit finder and app Fakespot, told FOX Business in March that consumers should be aware of counterfeit respiratory masks, gloves, sanitizer and other COVID-19 products being sold on Amazon every day.

“Before the crackdown, it was really bad,” said Robert Gross, co-founder and COO of Fakespot, a browser plugin that identifies fake product reviews and low-quality sellers. He said there were people selling fake N95 masks, expired masks, herbal remedies and vitamins that claimed to cure COVID-19, and other overpriced, fake or misleading products.

A new free service by Fakespot warns you if you're about to buy a product from a poorly-rated third-party Amazon seller and suggests a more reputable alternative.

"So we're talking about small products, phone case overs, blue tooth headphones, robotic vacuum cleaners in certain cases," said Khalifah. He says these products tend to have a high amount of competition, so the 5-star reviews make them stand out when people search.

Saoud Khalifah, founder and CEO of counterfeit finder and app Fakespot, said his company identifies counterfeit respiratory masks and gloves every day. Fakespot has also identified counterfeit hand sanitizer, COVID-19 information books and test kits, though those are less frequent.

Last year, the Federal Trade Commission sued a seller on Amazon for the first time, accusing them of using a website to generate fake reviews for weight loss pills. The agency also set sights on skincare brand Sunday Riley, who they claim padded reviews for their products.

"Phone case covers, Bluetooth headphones and other electronica paraphernalia or accessories. Usually those categories have a lot of fake reviews because it's very simple for someone to start selling their own Bluetooth headphones," said Khalifah.

“Amazon specifically has had an explosion in fake reviews,” said Saoud Khalifah, Founder and CEO of Fakespot.com. His team analyzes thousands of reviews on 7 different websites, including Amazon, Best Buy and TripAdvisor.

If a service lets people rate reviews as helpful or not, look for reviews with an unusually high number of “helpful” votes. Khalifah said merchants might try to game the system by artificially inflating favorable reviews as helpful so they show up more prominently.

More than a third of online reviews on major websites, including those on Amazon.com Inc., Walmart Inc. and Sephora, are fake, meaning they are generated by robots or people paid to write them, according to Fakespot Inc., which identifies fraudulent reviews.

Fakespot uses machine learning to scan and assess the accuracy of online reviews, and tests for various criteria like suspicious activity patterns and incentives.

"From the beginning we've been trained to understand that a five star rating correlates with a good product," says Saoud Khalifah, chief executive of Fakespot, a company which collects and analyses fake reviews.

Fakespot also tracks price history and trends to analyze products, but even better, Fakespot can help you identify counterfeit products and items that are inundated by fake or altered reviews.

It's difficult to suss out fake reviews yourself, but luckily there's a website called Fakespot that analyzes Amazon reviews for their authenticity.

According to Fakespot, fake reviews on Amazon surge during Prime Day. Last year, the percentage of fake reviews across the site spiked to 28.23% in July.

According to data from Fakespot, a website that uses artificial intelligence to help consumers determine the reliability of online reviews, fraudulent reviews on Amazon have climbed from 16.34% last June to more than 34% this June in all product categories.

To spot inauthentic reviews, Fakespot says shoppers need to "drill down" into the reviews themselves. Often, we just look at the amount of stars a product has — but Fakespot says this is not necessarily reliable. "Always check the actual reviews and do not rely on just the summary star rating because that’s what sellers who use fake reviews hope you will do," Fakespot said.

Fakespot, which analyzes fake reviews, released a report that finds fake reviews increase leading up to Amazon Prime Day in order to boost product sales. Fakespot also finds that three categories of tech products — cell phones, electronics, and bluetooth headsets — are especially flooded with fake reviews.

A report released Monday by Fakespot, a company that monitors online reviews, found that almost 35% of products on Amazon in June had fake reviews compared with 16% of products in the same month last year and almost 21% in June 2017.

New analysis by fraud detection company Fakespot says 36 percent of the hotel reviews on Trip Advisor are "fake and unreliable.

More than one-third of online hotel reviews are phony, new research from fraud detection company Fakespot suggests. The troubling study of fake hotel reviews also shows that you’re more likely to be fooled in some American cities than others.

...you can also use artificial intelligence to help parse Amazon reviews. The website Fakespot can analyze all the reviews on a particular Amazon listing in just a few seconds, looking for those factors typically associated with deception, like similar wording. It then tells you how many of the available reviews are likely to be authentic.

...we suggest using the FakeSpot app. Fakespot will analyze the reviews and/or product ratings for a listing on Amazon, appraising each review and letting you know how real or fake they appear to be...

...Fake reviews include, but aren’t limited to, bot-generated reviews and reviews that are influenced by the seller.

Vendors (those are products you see as “sold by Amazon”) can distribute their merchandise to semiprofessional reviewers through the Vine program, where users provide reviews in exchange for free products.

Moreover, counterfeiters are able to trick consumers with faked reviews; consumer watchdog Fakespot recently found that 23% of reviews for 362 different children’s car seats being sold on Amazon were fake or unreliable.

“If you are buying a high-value item, the onus is on you to research it as much as possible...This requires going on to different websites to read different reviews on the product. It will give you a diverse set of opinions that will allow you to discern the unreliable reviews. To find out if a set of reviews is fraudulent, you can look for red flags within the reviews themselves: poor grammar, few words left on the review, glowing reviews all posted at the same time and vague mentions of the product or service. These are the most obvious signs of fraud in reviews.”

Amazon and Walmart were recently cited in a report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office that found counterfeit cosmetic products contained dangerous substances such as cyanide and lead. This report also noted that in a random sampling 1 in 5 products purchased were counterfeit.

Out of nearly 3,000 vitamins for sale on Amazon’s website, 30pc were found to be fake and or unreliable...

Fake reviews are everywhere online and they’ve probably influenced some of your purchases. Fake reviews can be positive or negative, and they’re obviously unethical and harmful. But they’re the symptom of a larger problem with e-commerce and online platforms.

...In fact, 80% of consumers say they rely on feedback from other customers. But not all of the reviews are trustworthy.

A very useful tool that exists out there, is Fakespot. It analyzes websites that have reviews to determine if they are fake or likely to be real.

The UK government's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) estimates that customer reviews potentially influence £23 billion of customer spending in the UK every year.

According to FakeSpot the numbers are very high. Two examples include major retailers WalMart.Com and Amazon.Com. Walmart has 52% fake reviews while Amazon is at about 30%. (That’s 1 in 2 fake for Walmart and about 1 in 3 for Amazon).

Fakespot, a website that ID’s fake reviews, estimates 30% of product reviews on Amazon, and as many as 95% for “Chinese no-name companies, are inauthentic.

As many as half of reviews on Walmart.com may be "inauthentic and unreliable," while about 30 percent of Amazon reviews are considered suspect, Fakespot estimates.

An increase of fake reviews are hitting major retail websites. An analysis of online customer reviews from Fakespot found 52 percent of those posted on Walmart's website are inauthentic or unreliable. It found 30 percent of Amazon's reviews are fake.

Artificial Intelligence backed data authentication platform Fakespot announced it has surpassed 3 billion reviews analyzed, up 50% from the end of 2017.

The Federal Trade Commission brought its first successful case against a weight loss supplement maker who’d been buying Amazon reviews since October 2014.

Fake reviews are increasingly prevalent across many top retailer websites, according to a study from Fakespot, which analyzes online customer reviews for fake or unreliable reviews.

...there are even what he calls “review farms” in other countries, where people are hired full time to write reviews. “Many users are still unacquainted with the fact that the reviews they’re reading are highly bias, that they’re untrustworthy,”...

One of the reasons many consumers make poor online purchasing decisions is because hunting down reliable reviews takes time. Fakespot has made this process significantly easier. Just copy the link of the product you are considering and head over to the Fakespot site. Then paste the link into the analyzer tool. You’ll then receive a report card on the item’s reviews.

Finally, there is also a fantastic tool available to confirm your suspicions called Fakespot. This tool uses an algorithm to find patterns, in order to filter out fake reviews.

When in doubt, enlist help from technology. Websites like Fakespot give shoppers a sense of how trustworthy the reviews are for a given product.

With the holidays right around the corner an estimated 76 percent of Americans will do their holiday shopping on Amazon. ...Tons of 5-star reviews are great, but are they real? The website Fakespot is dedicated to helping consumers identify questionable online reviews.

If you rely on reviews when booking your next holiday or purchasing the latest gadget, there's a tool that can help you separate opinion from fiction. Fakespot is a new free tool that allows consumers to filter reviews in order to find those that are real in a bid to crack down on false and biased reviews.

Shoppers curious about the quality of reviews on a product can copy and paste the product page's link into a search bar on the Fakespot homepage and receive a grade on the overall reliability of the reviews, ranging from F to A.

Fake reviews -- positive or negative recommendations that may not accurately reflect a product's quality -- are still an issue for Amazon. You can check the validity of reviews by putting the product link into Fakespot.

Data analytics company Fakespot, for one, uses artificial intelligence to provide an instant analysis of the reliability of a product’s reviews.

One big determining factor when shopping online is how good or bad the reviews are? But what if the reviews are fake? It happens, sadly more often than many retailers would like to admit.So how do you know which reviews are reliable and which were written by people paid to hype up a product? Check out Fakespot.com.

Consumers can type in a product number in the FakeSpot.com website to find out if the reviews are legit.

Fakespot.com is a website dedicated to “fact checking” the reviews on Amazon, Yelp, TripAdvisor and the Apple App Store.

Fakespot cleverly looks at online reviews and makes sure the reviews are genuine, helping buyers make sure they can trust the reviews they see.

The Krazy Koupon Lady featured Fakespot on the Today Show. "Just copy and paste any Amazon product link into Fakespot, and within seconds, you’ll see whether it earned its 5-star reviews or bought them."

Web tools, such as the Fakespot app, can also help you assess whether reviews on your Yelp business page are inauthentic, which may provide further ammunition.

Wondering if that toaster really deserves five stars? Fakespot, an online tool that helps you separate junk reviews from the useful ones is here to save the day!... Even Google has finally started cracking down. They also use the program Fakespot to identify fake reviewers with better accuracy.

Fakespot made the #2 spot on this list of unbelievably useful websites! "When buying essentially anything online, I always look at the reviews and the ratings. Except that, uh, sometimes people write fake reviews, ruining everything. Fakespot will help sort out which reviews are fake and which are genuine, so that you can get exactly what you paid for, and not a weird mesh tank top with an extra opening instead."

Fakespot is genius. They give every product on Amazon a grade, A-F. “A” doesn’t mean the product is good or bad. It means the reviews are good and you can trust them to make your purchase. And “F” doesn’t always mean don’t buy. But it definitely means don’t trust a word those reviewers say.

There’s a lot of fakery online, and that’s particularly true with product reviews. Fortunately, you can avoid those on Amazon with Fakespot, a Chrome extension that analyzes reviews and shows you which ones are genuine and which aren’t. Take that, fakers.

Use Fakespot before making your next electronic, beauty, fashion, or household purchase. You can also visit Fakespot’s website to see their curated lists of the most authentic products by genre.

The piece, originally featured on Houston, Texas' KHOU, subsequently got picked up by almost 40 other news sources from around the country. A quote from the article: "If you’re on Amazon, you can also use Fakespot. The site was created to help consumers identify products with many fake reviews."

...Fakespot’s statistical analysis tries to spot trends and give you an idea of how likely the reviews below a given product are fake. If this site doesn’t suspect anything is wrong with the reviews, there’s a good chance you’ve got nothing to worry about.

...e-commerce sites, such as Amazon, have been struggling to deal with a growing number of fraudulent reviews, that may raise a company's rating but don't represent the product they are selling. ...Now, he always checks a product on Fakespot, a site that analyzes reviews on Amazon and Yelp, examining the language, timing and reviewer history.

It can be seriously hard to spot scams these days, even for someone who spends every waking moment on a digital screen like yours truly, but FakeSpot is great at separating great products from the frauds. FakeSpot can scan any Amazon listing and instantly know if any of the reviews are fake.

Fakespot isn’t just about sussing out the fake reviews... The company recently launched Trustwerty to highlight the good stuff.

Now that the holidays are approaching, chances are you'll be doing at least some of your gift shopping on Amazon.com. But before you click "buy" on the first favorably-reviewed item you find, take a minute to learn about how you can avoid getting duped by the site's fake reviews and phony products.

Upsetting as it is, it's also not uncommon for companies to produce fake, glowing reviews to boost appeal. Amazon fights this, but some still slip under the net. Fakespot.com identifies how genuine reviews are Again. All you have to do is paste a link, and the site will analyse a product's user reviews and grade their trustworthiness for you.

Listen to David Pogue's essential tips for saving money on WNYC's Leonard Lopate Show

Shopping for deals on Amazon, it's tough enough making sure you're getting a real TV and not an empty TV box. So when it comes to their clusterf*ck of reviews, who knows what you can trust? Fakespot knows.

FakeSpot, which reports having analysed 984,345 Amazon products and 3,984 Yelp listings to date, gives users a chance to do some investigating if they think a review looks a bit suspect.

This free service scans product reviews and reviewers to see if there’s anything that might be deceptive (fake reviews are a real thing!). In just a couple of seconds, you receive a letter grade based on how many product reviews seem both useful and legit.

Fakespot grades the reliability of Amazon and Yelp reviews. Copy the the link, and then the site will instantly analyze if it's a fake. It will use a letter grade that rates how much you should trust the review.

As Black Friday is just around the corner, check to see if the reviews that you are reading are factual ​before you buy online. FakeSpot is an Internet tool dedicated to helping Amazon shoppers weed out fake reviews and find the most authentic products.

Nevertheless, the proliferation of fake reviews means consumers need to be cautious when relying on ratings. Tools are available to help shoppers figure out whether reviews can be trusted, such as Fakespot.

Wondering if a toaster really deserves five stars? Copy the Amazon product page URL, paste it in at Fakespot, and click “analyze.” The site replies with a letter grade that rates how much you should trust the review.

Suspicious of a product? Run the Amazon link through Fakespot first. The site will show you a grade of the quality and authenticity of the product’s reviews.

I just wish I’d thought of this idea first

CNBC’s in-depth story about the trials small business owners face on Amazon points to Fakespot as the site to use to avoid counterfeits.

SimpleMost featured Fakespot in an article as one of “two simple tools to help you make the most of your Amazon purchase.”

Fakespot's an online tool that helps you separate the junk reviews from the useful ones

It’s a great time-saver, quickly analysing all of the reviews on a page and working out whether they’re suspiciously positive or not, as well as figuring out who actually bought the product in question.

There are a few different options out there that will help you spot products with fake reviews, but we’ve found Fakespot to be one of the best available. The website couldn’t be easier to use.

"Spot fake reviews in seconds with this tool", Video

Then there are third party sites like FakeSpot, which analyzes not just the reviews on an Amazon product page, but other reviews written by the users on that page.

...how can a potential new consumer tell a fake or paid review from an honest one? Well, don't worry, Amazon shoppers, there's a web tool that can do exactly this.

Sometimes you can't trust the mass of four and five star ratings, and that is where Fakespot comes in. This website (there's also a Chrome extension) hoovers up the reviews for a given product, crunches some algorithms, and gives you an estimate of the number of questionable reviews.

Ben’s Bargains recommends Fakespot as a convenient alternative to taking on the chore of sifting through the many reviews yourself.

Review data should offer greater transparency and protect consumer rights. But companies are playing the system. ...[Fakespot exists to] help the public identify which reviewed items were fake using machine learning and algorithms.

Skeptical consumers can put in a link to a product into Fakespot's site, which analyzes the reviews and determines the percentage of phony ratings. ...It's not always easy to pick a fake, especially if they're well crafted, although there's no lack of them: As many as 20 percent of all Internet reviews are fake